Recently my wife bought a piece of toddler swimwear for our little ones. A crisp, flashy neon green cute little piece of garment that had a label on which the color name was written: "KIWI POWER GREEN".

Having worked in the fashion/apparel retail industry for almost a decade, I know color names can often be as colorful as the actual colors they stand for; kiwi power green actually feels quite appropriate for that specific one.

Then I wondered, did they mean to describe "green" as "kiwi power", or was it a "kiwi" color in a "power green" variant? Both make total sense in my French-native ears.

Nice one. I see "power green" as being a "powerful shade of green" (it almost glows!). I do realize it's all marketing and in reality the color is nothing but a 3-digit code (if NRF-compliant most probably in the low 300's) with some arbitrary description, only I'm wondering if there's any "proper English" way of reading that description and figure out the intended meaning when the middle word could just as well apply to the first noun or to the actual color name.
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Mat's MugJan 24 '13 at 4:25

@retail As a 'proper English' person, my first thought was, what does that mean? As others have said, I think it is deliberately ambiguous. One marketing technique is combine words from 2 lists, eg list 1 is fruits/highly coloured objects, list 2 is energy. Maybe there are swimsuits called Mango Lightning Yellow or Bilberry Hydro Blue.
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MynamiteJan 25 '13 at 0:17